February 9, 2010

Our first exercise was the design of a Mobile Museum in the spirit of Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum (as an aside, Ban is currently teaching an options studio at the GSD focusing on temporary structures for disaster relief).

The Mobile Museum is conceived as a temporary, prefabricated and flexible exhibition space for art. We were asked to iterate a single design theme through several variations, using only manual model making methods to prototype design ideas.

My design process focused on a the development of a deployable and flexible structural system for the exhibition space. The exhibition space is conceived as a reconfigurable open hall, populated by mobile pavilions capable of absorbing program that requires additional enclosure or spatial definition. Towards the end of the exercise I studied several variations of a triangulated grid-shell type structure based on Yoshimura buckling patterns and origami folding techniques.

This spring I am taking part in Edwin Chan's options studio entitled GSD 1313: Convergence. The studio seeks to interrogate the interface between physical and digital design processes.

Since the early 90s, three-dimensional digital working methods have become the default mode of design within architectural practice. Manual design methods such as physical model making have been largely neglected as design tools, and relegated to supporting roles as representational techniques.

The studio argues that analog, intuitive, and manual methods are powerful techniques for conceptualizing, developing and testing architectural design. Rather than abandoning these techniques, the studio seeks to merge their strengths with those of advanced digital modelling and fabrication.

The sophisticated physical/digital working method developed by Gehry Partners and Gehry Technologies will be staged as a point of departure in order to develop other hybrid methodologies.

In addition to my blog, in the next weeks I will be developing a blog for the entire studio where we will post regular updates on our work and methodological explorations. As soon as the site is up and running I will post it here.